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Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Jorge A. Caballero agonized over whether to send his toddler to preschool, but ultimately decided he couldn't teach his child how to socialize and share with other children at home. On the third day of school, he received the news all parents dread: His child was in contact with another who tested positive for COVID-19.
He now regrets that decision and doesn't know if he'll send his toddler back.
"We're setting ourselves up for a major wave that starts with children," he said.
Caballero, co-founder and head of data insights for Coders Against COVID and a clinical informatics researcher, should know. For more than a year he's been poring over COVID data and posting aggregated metrics from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and other large school districts on his Twitter feed, @DataDrivenMD.
And just over a week ago, LAUSD parent advocacy group Parents Supporting Teachers tapped Caballero to help them get data they were asking the district for for months.
Less than a week after the district reported the first school-based COVID-19 outbreak at Grant Elementary School in East Hollywood where seven children contracted the virus, the parent group detailed thousands more COVID cases.
Those cases do not appear to be contracted at schools, but according to the parent group, district data shows there were 2,862 active COVID cases among students and staff as of Sunday night.
LAUSD has its own dashboard where parents can search for their child's school and see how many students or staff tested positive for COVID and how many cases were linked to a "school-based transmission." It also shows the infection rate for the community of schools and the community identified by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
But the dashboard doesn't show district-wide aggregated data like the figures reported Sunday. That's where Caballero stepped in.
Caballero wrote a script that scrapes the district's data, and every morning he turns it over to a group of parents who've created a public Google spreadsheet that shows the rates district-wide, not just the individual school. It also creates a record of what the numbers were each day so parents can compare the rates and see trends over time. The district data offers just a snapshot of the data for that day. It helps parents "better understand and contextualize COVID-19 cases across our schools and neighborhoods," the group said.
Jorge Caballero is co-founder and head of data insights for Coders Against COVID.
"He has been a godsend," said Jenna Schwartz, co-founder of Parents Supporting Teachers. She quickly realized how monumental the task was after members of her group began to input the data for nearly 1,000 campuses by hand. Then, they found Caballero. "None of this would have been possible without him."
LAUSD has such robust data about positive cases because it requires every staff member and student to be tested weekly, regardless of their vaccination status. That is the strictest testing protocol of any major school district in the nation.
We talked to Caballero about why it was important to release this cumulative data.
What prompted you to start pulling the LAUSD data yourself and posting it on Twitter?
The reason I have an interest in what's going on at LAUSD and even New York City schools is because what they do ends up having a ripple effect across the country. We have a child who is too young to be vaccinated. We are in a precarious position where we can't safely send them to school because the community case rate is so high across the country [and] there is a known risk of our child getting exposed. In fact, we were just notified yesterday that they were exposed.
In the absence of effective public health measures, we will continue to have exposures and outbreaks that have collateral damage in that they harm people that are either immunocompromised or children who are too young to be vaccinated.
From my perspective of over a decade of health data expertise and analysis, it's in the data. We cannot afford to have people choose not to be vaccinated if we hope to keep schools open safely, if we hope to regain any sense of normality moving forward.
The moment that you put unvaccinated children and staff in an enclosed space for hours at a time, with the highly transmissible delta variant, you're going to have clusters of cases almost immediately.
When you talk to parents and you talk to teachers about the process — the process that is actually going on in terms of exposure notification — you quickly get the sense that LAUSD only has had seven school-linked cases, because they're not being reported effectively. They're not being contract-traced effectively.
The numbers don't add up. We're setting ourselves up for a major wave that starts with children.
Do you fault LAUSD for not having effective contact tracing, specifically, or are you saying in general that's a problem we're having at the national level as well?
It's not LAUSD's fault that we squandered the summer. We should have done better at a national, state and local level at recognizing the clear and present threat that was and is the delta variant.
We knew what was coming our way. Everything that's making headlines in the U.S. now made headlines in England, Scotland, the U.K, Israel, India, New Zealand, Australia.
We did fail at the policy level to adapt back-to-our-school policies to this new reality. It's taking a lot of effort to overcome the inertia of all of these existing policies and to move the Titanic in a direction that's going to steer away from that iceberg.
We all worked as hard as we could. We were at mile 23 of a marathon. Delta variant set us back to around mile 13. We have to adapt and we will make this into a relay race, we will find a way to get to the finish line, but we have to recognize that there needs to be a change in the strategy. We can't keep doing what we were doing.
Are there tech issues that you're seeing with the LAUSD dashboard?
You can tell that the folks at LAUSD are struggling with the dashboard. There's just little quirks shown up over the course of the past two weeks. As a software engineer myself, I can tell that they're having difficulty getting their hands around the data.
In LAUSD's COVID dashboard and in your database you have the data divided by the communities identified by the L.A. County Department of Public Health and include the community case rate reported by the county. Why is it important to compare infection rates at schools to the community as a whole?
Comparing the case rate at the individual schools to the broader community is one way to identify data gaps and/or the need for improved contact tracing. For nearly every facility, the school-based case rate has been higher than the community and county case rates. This observation was the first indication, to me, that LAUSD was going to run into problems. When the school-based case rates are significantly higher than the community and county rates, this suggests that the community and county-level data is underestimating the actual case rate. For example, asymptomatic persons aren't getting tested and it could mean that school-based transmission is under-reported due to inadequate contact tracing resources. Before school started, the former issue was dominating the disparity in rates, but the more time that unvaccinated and/or unmasked kids spend in classrooms, cafeterias and hallways, the more that the latter comes into play.
Why is it important to have aggregated data rather than just data by school?
Detecting hotspots requires the ability to zoom in-and-out of the data across geography and time. Say that you're a family with a child under 12 who is in a social bubble with families that have kids in high school: You'd probably want to avoid having one of those high schoolers babysit when the case rate for the community of schools is trending upward.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to the president, said he hopes we will have "some good control" over COVID by spring 2022 if people get vaccinated.
We can absolutely change that. It just requires the political will to acknowledge the problem and to be willing to make those tough decisions.
Would you support a federal vaccine mandate?
Absolutely. There's talk about a state level vaccine mandate and I'm very supportive of that. We are in a public health emergency. Based on the data that I'm seeing, it makes absolute sense and it would be quite frankly political and public health malpractice not to consider a vaccination mandate for those who are eligible for a fully approved vaccine.
You decided to send your toddler child to school and that's where they were exposed?
Just like any other set of parents, there's only so much you can do to help your child develop especially at this early age. There's no way two adults can teach their child how to share, how to socialize, how to resolve conflict.
We made the very difficult decision to try to send our kiddo back to pre-school and we thought we had everything covered. They spent no more than 15 minutes inside of a classroom, because we picked them up late and dropped them off early. We bought them HEPA filters, we made sure the windows were open and the staff were fully vaccinated. We did everything we possibly could within our control, and then some.
Three days into the school year, we received a notification that our child was exposed on the first day of class. We find ourselves in a situation that is all-too-common across the country, certainly across the state and definitely across the L.A. Unified School District.
Do you think you'll send your child back?
I didn't want to send them at all, but we had to for their sake. We needed to send them to school. I'm not certain that we will send them back. In our case, it seems as though somebody sent their child to class while waiting for test results. That is a frustratingly common scenario based on what my pediatrician friends are telling me. That's a betrayal of trust that we had placed on the other families in the school. We haven't decided yet, but right now, I'd say absolutely not.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues. “There's an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said. She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman's side, I'd like to think we do a better job of making sure that there's spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.
Here's what people are saying about the fifth day of L.A. Tech Week on social:
#LATechWeek has been on 🔥🔥🔥. Yes the events are super cool at amazing venues. But, I’m blown away by the people. I’ve met so many founders building generative AI companies from the ground up. I’m so bullish on LA right now🥳. LA is for builders #longLA
Thanks @rpnickson 📸 pic.twitter.com/B6rT2jJYIs
— Dr. Kelly O'Brien (@Kvo2013) June 8, 2023
Successful LatinxVC Avanza Summit 2023 in LA! It’s been an amazing few days near the beach w great company. Thank you to our panelists & participants.
Huge thanks to our incredible sponsors SVB, Chavez Family Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, PledgeLA, Fenwick & West, Countsy! pic.twitter.com/oVuGIgFurk
— LatinxVC (@LatinxVCs) June 9, 2023
30+ gaming startups presented at the A16z Speedrun Demo Day in LA yesterday. Great thanks to the @a16zGames team for an awesome day of events! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/DKq8IFo5QZ
— Grace Zhou (@graceminzhou) June 9, 2023
📣🤩 What’s the buzz? It’s #LATechWeek from @TechstarsLA & @TechstarsHealth joint demo day with the #Techstar HC team where our @fyelabs founder/CEO Suvojit Ghosh mentored both cohorts! #TechStars demo day highlighted 12 amazing emerging #startups in #healthtech #innovation. 🩺 pic.twitter.com/0RXClCtfDQ
— FYELABS (@fyelabs) June 9, 2023
Another successful Coffee On Slauson in the books for #LATechWeek.
Special thanks to the good people at Pledge LA, SVB and @GundersonLaw for the ongoing support and the @findyourhilltop staff for providing the space, eats & vibes. ♻️ pic.twitter.com/51cMDoEn30
— Slauson & Co. (@SlausonAndCo) June 9, 2023
The perfect combo to start #LATechWeek Day 5: pastries, coffee, and great convos with industry founders ✨
Fireside chats with @enriquealle, @wp, and @robynpark pic.twitter.com/booYPdekVV
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Of course @designerfund has the most amazing pastries at their event. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/PjyWlGTQI4
— Jesse Pickard (@jessepickard) June 9, 2023
My favorite event from @Techweek_ has to be "Modern Storytelling & Business Building." Hosted by @STHoward #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/SV1eexMJ4k
— JonnyZeller (@JonnyZeller) June 9, 2023
And the finale of the night was courtesy of the one and only @zedd for an unforgettable end to the "City of Games" party! Hosted by @a16zGames and @100Thieves #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hliI9yLKse
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Excited to be at the @a16zGames Speedrun Demo Day! Loved the energy and excitement from the companies that pitched there. It was also great to see @Tocelot and @ndrewlee at this amazing #LATechWeek event pic.twitter.com/NfLQO5lR27
— Andy Lee | andypwlee.bit (@andypwlee) June 9, 2023
Thank you to everyone who joined the Sony Venture Fund US team at #LATechWeek for our screening of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Last summer, we started building a presence in LA. Today, it's exciting to host such an event with the @Sony family and the LA VC community. pic.twitter.com/wdDm6qtHdL
— Sony Innovation Fund (@Sony_Innov_Fund) June 9, 2023
Time to eat, connect and build while @remi_rodney provided the vibes. 🙏🏽#LATechWeek @BuildOnBase @developer_dao @WeAreRazorfish pic.twitter.com/QIPh1gjvoA
— Hola Metaverso-Blockchain & New Web Tech Events 🎪 (@holametaverso) June 9, 2023
@Lux_Capital at #LATechWeek advancing the impossible to inevitable, from..
..defense primes partnering with cutting edge defense tech startups, to..
..hardware x LLMs improving mental health.
From the rich and diverse LA ecosystem stems generational companies: pic.twitter.com/v5S5r8JtbU
— Shahin Farshchi (@Farshchi) June 9, 2023
LA Tech Week has been a blast! Met some amazing creators, founders and investors from all over the world! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/AAh9JFELhe
— Chris Germano (@netslayer) June 9, 2023
Had such a blast at LA Tech Week and hosting events for @brexHQ
Top highlights were collabing with @pulley on an Emerging Managers / Founder mixer at the @poplco House, rooftop event in Venice, creator panel with @thechangj & proper Korean food with in KTown.
Exhausted is an… pic.twitter.com/mGQnSYGPdg
— Τyler Robinson (@TyyRob3) June 9, 2023
Did you have fun at @sophiaamoruso’s launch party for @trustfundvc? #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/gbrbXRQ9Xx
— Kay (@KaySnels) June 9, 2023
y00tilty in every city with @KaylaLor3n & @cryptochrisg813.
Welcome to the LA @y00tsNFT fam! #LATechWeek #3XP week. pic.twitter.com/6wWKlsTacx
— VanG0xH (@CryptoVanGoghs) June 9, 2023
Really enjoyed #LATechWeek. Here are some observations I made 👇
— s.personal.ai (Suman Kanuganti) (@SumanPersonalAI) June 9, 2023
Thank you @TheKofiAmpadu for including me in #demoday with the latest @a16ztxo cohort! It was a real full circle moment to witness the brilliance of both @ChrisLyons & @ZMuse_ & #PledgeLA very own. She’s why we’re #LongLA 🚀💕 #LAtechweek pic.twitter.com/itkKXMxQRb
— Qiana Qiana! (@Q_i_a_n_a) June 9, 2023
@upfrontvc Gaming Founders Podcast #iLOVELA #LATechWeek @Techweek_ @KatiaAmeri @mucker @fikavc @bonfire_vc @TenOne10 @WatertowerGroup @ganasvc @IAmRobRyan @john_at_stonks @eva_ho @dereknorton pic.twitter.com/LCbaGXCoW7
— Sean Goldfaden (@seangoldfaden) June 9, 2023
Hosts Kevin Zhang, Partner at @upfrontvc, and Eden Chen, CEO of @pragmaplatform, interviewed two special guests from @raidbaseinc Stephen Lim, Co-Founder & Product Director, and Trevor Romleski, Co-Founder & Game Director. 🎙 #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hxHEAoELZ6
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Kicking off @a16zGames @100Thieves City of Games party at #LATechWeek 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/zQcZedG15f
— Jon Lai (@Tocelot) June 9, 2023
Yesterday at @socinnovation I got to have this AWESOME conversation with @iamwill — musician, producer, technology entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of https://t.co/D60y1e2JOu #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/KBxK6rXyTG
— Anna Barber (@annawbarber) June 9, 2023
I absolutely love this game. Proud moment for the team @investwithatlas. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/fPZvKXU7TC
— Tobias Francis (@TobiasFrancis) June 9, 2023
Had a blast at LA Tech Week this year with @brexHQ
From hosting & moderating my first creator panel featuring @BlakeMichael14, to a fun rooftop night in Venice, and to attending some amazing events such as Watertower’s emerging manager panel and a VC/founder tennis tournament pic.twitter.com/udjfmLHE0L
— Jonathan Chang (@thechangj) June 8, 2023
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.